GOOD fences make good neighbours, as Robert Frost famously wrote, but it doesn’t always work. One evening I was engrossed in Tim Parks’s Italian Life, an embittered account of nepotism in Italian universities, when Alan issued the latest bulletin from his book. He was part-way through the second volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, which he found in a second-hand bookshop. (The hunt for volume one continues.)

The bed-time reading hour for me is a bit like taking an Open University course. Every few minutes I’m treated to a quote or a page from whatever he has embarked on. The problem is, it makes me want to read it too, so that when he’s finished, it is added to my bed-side pile. When this begins to resemble Cleopatra’s Needle it is scaled back, with the result that I immediately lose sight and memory of all the books I intended to read for myself.

On this occasion, his attention had been caught by the chapter on Northern Ireland and the Brighton bombing. When the Troubles were raging, Thatcher was not convinced the Republic of Ireland took security seriously enough. As a result, writes Moore, “From time to time she would put forward the idea of a fence, built all along the border”. That this would have an ‘access corridor’ in no way diminished the insensitivity – you might say insanity – of the idea. Needless to say, the fence she envisaged was not so much picket as razor-wire.

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Fortunately none of her colleagues allowed her to proceed, but this didn’t stop her returning to the suggestion again and again. What the public would have made of this, had it been reported, can only be imagined. Donald Trump’s much trumpeted wall between the US and Mexico seems almost uncontroversial by comparison.

The history of belligerent bulwarks between us and them goes back millennia. The fuss over a Belgian farmer who recently moved a boulder that marked the boundary with France because it was getting in the way of his tractor, and in so doing enlarged his country, is as nothing to the trouble that would have erupted had anyone breached, say, the Berlin Wall.

Here in Britain we have walled cities and towns, but our answer to the biggest barrier of them all, the Great Wall of China, is Hadrian’s Wall, or Vallum Hadriani, also known as the Picts’ Wall or Roman Wall. Running from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west, it served a similar function: to keep enemies out while at the same time displaying the might of the Roman Empire.

Centurions on patrol probably never ceased to be amazed they had reached this far across a cold and primitive land. In the centuries they lived here, some settled contentedly but others pined for the hot-baked earth of home. Archaeological finds at forts such as Vindolanda and Housesteads, which include such sophisticated facilities as a bathhouse, make it clear why England came as a shock.

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The Great Wall of China can be seen from outer space, but what about Hadrian’s Wall? Had we landed on the moon in the 2nd century, when it was newly built, might it have been visible too? I like to think so. As, perhaps, do its custodians.

At the moment, however, it is in a sorry state, badly depleted by walkers tramping over its remains, or carrying home a fragment as a souvenir. An artist friend, whose mother lives in Hoolet, says she would be happy if it were further eroded, or entirely obliterated. No fan of what it represents, she would like to project a sign onto it, reading Romans Go Home. In light of its impending restoration, she might reword this to Tourists Go Home.

Thanks to a £30m grant from the Scottish and English governments and the Hadrian’s Wall partnership board, the Picts’ Wall will soon be repaired, enhanced and promoted. The intention is to rival China’s monument, and they hope to surpass attractions anywhere in the UK outside London. To that end, British archaeologists are to liaise with their Chinese counterparts: on one side a group in charge of 73 miles, on the other those with 13,000 miles in their care and countless centuries of expertise to draw on.

Hadrian’s Wall is nothing like Hadrian’s Villa, the emperor’s country pile. A sprawling ruin near Tivoli, it lies amid acres of landscaped grounds which today are inhabited only by statues. I prefer the wall and its bleak mood.

George R R Martin, author of Game of Thrones – which will be used as a hook to draw tourists – is not the only one who has stood upon it, wondering what it was like to be a Roman legionary faced with an outlandish enemy to the north. Hence his own fictional wall in Westeros, beyond which the living dead stalk a realm of perpetual winter. As he reflected on his visit, “For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilisation; it was the end of the world.”

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Not for the English who lived between the wall and Scotland it wasn’t. For them, barbarism didn’t begin until Coldstream. In popular perception, however, Hadrian’s Wall has long marked the dividing line between the countries, between cultivated and wild, fellow countrymen and treacherous foreigners. As a result, England’s most northerly inhabitants were left in no-man’s land.

Today’s sight-seers are in danger of unconsciously increasing Scotland’s territory by thirty or more miles as they look northwards, imagining they’re on the lip of another country.

In Europe, the idea of the north used to be almost synonymous with barbarians. That is what makes the Roman Wall so fascinating. It is tangible evidence of a time when the concept “there be dragons” was truly terrifying. To think that it was us, across the Border, who were the ogres, giving rise to nightmares and cold sweats, makes you stare in the mirror. Are we really that scary?

Perhaps in the past we were. In the days when Hadrian was lounging by his plunge pool under the eyes of stone nymphs and satyrs, we were daubing woad on our faces and bared chests to show we meant business. Now, the only hint of blue beyond the old Roman line is the wall of Scottish Conservative seats that marches coast to coast along the Border.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of the Herald.